Life Mastery. Simply Put.

When it comes to being productive and spending your creative energy throughout the day, you want to invest your energy in the most important tasks, so that you can produce the highest level of work. However, sometimes we get lost in our own little worlds and we don’t know what we should focus on.

Well to combat that, here’s a quick little phrase you can tell yourself to help you get back on track.

“Do the thing you least want to do.”

We, as humans, have a funny habit of putting loathing and importance together. We loathe to do the things that we most need to do, because we have given it so much significance that it turns us off from ever starting(until of course the last minute, where we go in an adrenaline filled frenzy). We get caught up in our own hype, that we actually disable ourselves from starting.

So what do we need to do? Well since we figured out what we need to do, we have somewhere to start. We have something that is stressing us out, and so that is what we are going to attack. What I am about to recommend is going to sound a little woo-woo, but stick with me, and try it out.

The task that you have put off, and blown out of portion, needs to be humbled mentally. Most likely the thought of even starting the task is painful to you, because you have attached your beliefs of how difficult the task will be, and after attaching belief after belief, you get one monstrous behemoth that will hurt you and your loved ones (kidding). So this is what you need to do.

Get the image you have in your head. This is a mental exercise, so it will help if you close your eyes. Now get the image of you doing the task in your head, allow yourself to feel all the stress, and all the fear.

Make the image black and white. Most likely, the image in your head is very clear to you, because of how much you are stressing it. This will help you neutralize the task(seriously just try it).

Now, make it smaller. I know how that sounds, but before you go to the small gray x to exit this screen, hear me out. When we over-stress the importance and difficult of a task, we literally blow the task out of proportion in our minds. We blow up the image, and it becomes literally overwhelming mentally. We daunt ourselves, and in turn, we literally make the image too large, so the first step is to shrink the image in our head.

Make the image you have in your head of you doing the task as small as possible(think of an ant, make it that small). And then, because when you thought of the image, you most likely saw the image right in front of you, place it behind you. Now put it a mile away from you. And now place it so far that you literally can’t tell where it is.

Whenever I find myself stressing out over a task, I use this mental trick all the time. I actually forgot about this, but luckily I remembered while I was writing this blog post which was originally intended to be a rant post about a current project of mine that I had been over-stressing.

If this doesn’t work, here are some other things that you can do on top of what I have described above.

Imagine throwing the b/w, tiny image into the sun, and imagine it burning up.

Zoom out.
Picture where you are actually working on the task, and then zoom out, and see the building you are working in. Then zoom out again, and see the city you are working in. It just reminds you of how insignificant you and your work is, and it really humbles me and the task.

Work out.

Divide the task into small actionable goals.

I hope you guys got as much value out of this post as I did, it was a great reminder~